A New Vision of AI Consciousness– Person of Interest

When I first saw Person of Interest my initial thought was not when would this “help a person of the week” cops/spy series evolve into a science fiction theme, but that when it did so evolve would we be seeing a Forbin Project or a “Sky Net” situation (you did get that John Reese could be John Connor and Kyle Reese…). Am I being paranoid? Not really as it seems, read on.

From the latest POI episodes we’ve learned there are two machines (I eerily recall the line “There is another system” from Forbin); and that Mr. Finch’s machine presents one message to him while another to Root. It can be a cold, calculating device, and yet it can have sympathy.

How can that be? One machine with parallel minds?

io9 is a daily publication that covers science, science fiction, and the future. And it just issued a tremendous exploration of POI, The Machine, Decima, Vigilance and more.

“We caught up with producers Jonathan Nolan and Greg Plageman to talk about what comes next, and their real-life inspirations for the guns-and-malware world of this show.”

As I suspected: Person of Interest is a paranoid tale of surveillance and its consequences.

Oddly enough they refer to the movie Colossus — The Forbin Project, which I mentioned in an earlier blog (see I was not being paranoid).

There is also discussion of the real world. That Google may know more about us than the NSA. And a marvelous analogy of the Machine to the CIA’s dual mind towards Fidel Castro and Cuba in the late ’50s. Most of you won’t know or remember that. Trust me, shades of gray in its full brilliance.

The Machine on Person of Interest is a new vision of AI Consciousness. Something to be feared? Read the article and you decide if it’s the rise of the machines or the private data brokers that should be of real concern. All this discussion from a TV show. Imagine that.